She’s my neighbor, fill my cup… sugar on my tongue

Just as we were heading out to take our walk this morning, Tom Earle, the local farmer, came walking up the icy path across the yard to our front door, asking to tap the maple trees that line the driveway by the barn. We tagged along with him over to the barn, where his pickup truck was parked. He scrambled up into his truck bed to gather stacks of galvanized steel buckets. “Apparently now galvanized steel is no good for eating,” he said, “but I don’t know.” From the cab, he fetched a ball peen hammer, a battery-powered drill, a small metal tap, and a plastic spout.

He approached the nearest maple tree. We followed him, clambering over the hard icy packed snowdrift. They’re old, the trees here, with silvered, hoary bark, tall and shaggy.

He told us this is a good time for mapling now, cold nights and warmer days, when the sap, frozen in the roots all winter, thaws in the sun and rises hydraulically up the trunk and into the branches to feed the tree. “They have vacuum pumps now, the modern maplers, and even with the new machinery, they only get about 7 percent more than with these old methods. And that’s only 10, 20 percent of the tree’s sap. Some of them are planting maple trees a few feet apart and when they get high enough, they go through and whack off the tops and take out the sap that way.” He shook his head and laughed.

“Kind of like mountaintop removal mining,” I said, cringing a little as Dingo took a shit right by the front right wheel of Tom’s truck.

Tom politely ignored Dingo and considered the lower trunk. This one already had a mapling hole in it. “The hole always leaves a little bruise,” he said. “You don’t want to use an old hole.”

He walked around the trunk and stopped. “The sap is everywhere right now, but a good spot is usually under a branch.” He drilled a shallow hole a foot below the biggest low branch, then gently pocked in the metal tap with the hammer. “You can hear the sound change when it hits the sap.” He set the bucket’s handle into the hook in the tap so it was wedged securely just below it. A clear, thin drop welled and pinged into the bottom of the bucket. “The first drop,” he said, attaching the spout.

“I wonder who first thought to tap maple trees,” I said.

“The Indians didn’t have buckets, so they hollowed out tree trunks and set them under the spouts to collect sap,” he said. “And to sugar it off, because they didn’t have pots, they would drop hot rocks into the tree hollows. It’s 40 to 1, the ratio of sap to syrup. It takes two days in a pot with a good fire going. Imagine how long it took with hot rocks.”

“I wonder if animals like maple sap,” I said.

He laughed. “Everyone knows sugar,” he said. “I’ve got a terrible sweet tooth, myself, but we’ll have enough maple syrup left over to sell.” He invited us to visit his sugar hut later on, an invitation we accepted, and then off we went for our walk in the sudden springlike warmth. The dirt road had melted in rivulets and ice shards. The air temperature was less than 30 degrees, but the sun warmed everything up.

By the time we got back, less than an hour later, Tom had moved off to tap another copse of maples, and the trees lining the drive each had two buckets attached to their lower trunks.

It’s amazing to me, a former New Yorker who spent my entire post-school life in the city before I first came up here 5 years ago, to live in such close proximity to people who know how to DO shit, who’ve learned, and who practice, the old traditional ways. When my ex-husband and I renovated our 19th century row house in Greenpoint, we did most of the work ourselves, in part because there was no one to hire. Jon had worked for about 15 years after college as a building contractor, but when his joints gave out and he left that business, there was no one to hand it on to. All the young kids were now in I.T. and media.

Up here, this is not the case. The contractors who renovated our Portland house were our tenants’ best friends; finding them was the easiest thing in the world. I had been wanting to watch someone tap a maple tree, and he came walking up to our front door one warmish late-winter morning.

Sometimes I feel like all I have to do is ask, and I meet someone who has what I want. Last month in Portland, at the first meeting of our newly formed Scotch Club, which is exactly what it sounds like, I idly expressed a yearning to cook moose. It turned out that Bri, who lives two blocks away from us, had a freezer full that she wasn’t sure what to do with; her girlfriend’s father is a hunter.

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “If you give me some of that moose, I’ll cook it for the next Scotch Club meeting.”

When I went to her house to collect it, she handed me three packages of frozen meat marked “backstrap,” “New York sirloin,” and “stew meat.” I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. I took them straight home and thawed the packages in a pot of hot water. The meat was a deep ruby-purple. There was no fat on it. It smelled mineral-fresh, not gamey at all; I reserved all the liquid that pooled in the bags from thawing.

I had decided to bourguignon the hell out of the moose, so I used Ina Garten’s recipe, substituting moose for beef. I used plenty of thyme, butter, lardons, cognac, and an entire bottle of dry red wine.

That night’s Scotch club meeting began in the living room with cheese, crackers, and a tasting of the night’s first single malt, Glenfiddich, which we all pronounced smooth and tasty. Then we thronged into the kitchen and filled our plates with buttered fresh gluten-free fettucine topped with moose bourguignon and buttered peas, and alongside, a salad of herb mix and fennel with a strong vinaigrette. The moose meat was tender and savory and stalwart enough to sop up all the rest of the single malts that followed that night.

6 Comments

Oh this was such a great read. (I’ve been following for a while, but I think this is the first time I’ve left a comment.) The mapling reminds me of the Little House books which I loved growing up. The moose sounds beautiful.

Dalwhinnie.
Such a marvellous single Malt in a wee ditsy bottle.Regular sipping whisky that’s light and a little fruity.
Just about the only Scotch that doesn’t turn me into a raging monster if I drink too much.

Here’s a link to an old post of mine about making paté from moose liver: http://bit.ly/1cUfVnK. I’m not a huge fan of moose meat, antelope is my favorite — but I know what you mean about people who DO things. Part of why I’ve stayed in Montana …

Just read your excellent personal essay in the new Elle Magazine via a link on your Facebook Author fan page. So happy you are free. You are one of my favorite authors and I look forward to everything and anything you write.